Process-oriented Paradigm

Process Work (also called Process Oriented Psychology) is a school of psychotherapy and a cutting edge approach to personal and organizational change. It is a way of researching and improving one’s ability to resolve conflicts in individual and social contexts and discovering meaningful new directions in life.

The founder of Process Work is Arnold Mindell, a Jungian analyst, psychologist and physicist. Together with a group of colleagues and friends he has for the last forty years been developing this unique method and approach to working with people. There are today research and educational Process Work institutions in many places of the world (for a list of some of them please see the links below).

Process Work embraces humanistic issues of happiness, fulfillment and meaning. It explores dreams, emotions and subjective experiences. At the same time it is a ﬁeld of knowledge developed across a wide and congruent theoretical basis.

The crucial aspect of this approach is seeing one’s experiences as potentially meaningful and useful. For this reason it is much more important to understand them and use them in a constructive way rather than to judge or pathologize them.

Process Work was in the beginning mainly a school of psychotherapy, but with time its applications have been widened to such ﬁelds as: working with groups and organizations, facilitating social and international debates and conflicts, communicating with people near death and people in comas, supporting and working with creativity and art. This list continues to grow with the development of Process Work itself.